Tuesday
At the start of this year, I won an auction to support the literary journal Hunger Mountain that gave me the opportunity to send a manuscript to Steve Almond for critique. I sent him a flash piece I'd been working on--and what I got in return was some generous praise and suggestions. I recently emailed him and, being the all-around cool guy that he is, he gave me permission to reprint his comments and advice here.
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Almond began the "bad news" with these comments:
You seem to me to be withholding a tremendous amount here. I imagine that's part of your intent, but to me it's still an imitative fallacy. That is, in writing a story about failed efforts to connect, you've failed to allow the story to connect with the reader. You've simply proved to me the truth that you set out to prove--it's hard to connect--while failing to make me feel the tragedy of that truth. You've settled for an idea rather than educing in the reader an actual feeling.
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As Almond pointed out, the problem is that the withheld information are things the character himself knows. Almond explained this problem:
And so it's virtually impossible to feel that we're getting the whole story when you refuse to supply the reader the dramatic circumstances through which your protagonist is moving. It feels coy at the least, and evasive at the worst. Particularly in light of how closely you hew to this guy's consciousness. We get all the minutiae of his thought process--the little reveries about old sitcoms and albums--with no greater sense of who we're dealing with, what his fears and desires are, exactly, and how the action of the story presses him against same.
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Anticipating my own defensiveness (But it's a short short!), Almond discussed this advice as it relates to (very) short fiction:
I write a lot of short shorts, and so I know that the form has its limitations. But my own sense is that you're missing the heart of the matter here, perhaps on purpose, and that the reader is the one thereby deprived. Of course, I may be missing something, though I've read the story three times now. It's also true that I look for particular things from stories. I want sudden bursts of empathy, unbearable feelings, excessive emotional involvement. I want my heart broken, or at least punched pretty good. I'm not much interested in ideas, unless we are led to them through feeling. Such are my biases as a reader and writer.
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My thoughts? Well, I'd felt a bit stuck about what I need to focus upon to continue to evolve as a flash fiction writer, so I felt pretty thrilled that Almond gave me such specificity, and what he noticed seemed to me to be something that appeared in a number of flash fiction pieces I'd written recently. So here are five things I'm going to work on:
- If the character knows it, the reader should know it. What's withheld from a reader should be the things the character isn't yet aware of. For example, the withheld information of Sixth Sense works, because the character himself also isn't yet aware of it. As he learns of it, we do, too.
- Emotional resonance arises from readers' knowing a character. A character's desire, and that desire being clear, creates many of the things needed for readers to connect to a story. It creates purpose, narrative drive, stakes, and that aforementioned connection. While the postmodern sense of fragmentation and disconnectedness might be something that's part of my own sensibility and/or a character's, I still need to find a way to connect to my character and have my character connect to readers.
- Ideas suck. Well, not exactly. But I need to imply ideas, and make a character's motivation and desire and fears more in the forefront, of not only my thinking as a I write the flash, but also of the flash itself.
- I write with my head too much. I'm not a feeling person. I use what little intellect I have to understand and grapple with the world. I need to try to use emotion more to make sense of things, to drive and motivate my characters.
- Feedback from "strangers" is a good thing. After a while, writers might rely on the same group of people as critical first readers. New eyes often lead to new insights.
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In the coming days, look for Todd B. Stevens's review of Steve Almond's collection of short shorts and essays This Won't Take a Minute Honey. And thanks, Steve Almond, for the reprint permission, the great critique, and tons of helpful suggestions.
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For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
From Kyle Minor
March 2, 2010 at 3:59 pm
I think Steve’s advice — about not withholding information the character knows which the reader also needs to know in order to make sense of what’s going on in the dramatic present in the same way the character is — is spot on, IF you’re writing in a first person, a close third person, or an alternating close third person. But a lot of the flash fiction I’m seeing (or writing) is from points of view we see less often in longer short stories, such as the objective point of view (no access to anyone’s interiority), an omniscience that explicitly or implicitly acknowledges the presence of a narrator who is writer qua writer, or an omniscience that parcels out the various points of view slowly (proportionally, I mean — I know that there’s nothing particularly slow about a 300‑1000 word story.) In those cases, we have structures, often, that more closely approximate the stage play or the novel or the dramatic monologue or the poem or just about anything, really, except the single-movement, single focal character short story. So the writer has a different set of issues to manage with regard to the management of information, since the controlling consciousness is different and is operating under different rules and appetites.
From Randall Brown
March 2, 2010 at 4:06 pm
I do like that about flash, the way that writers experiment with a variety of structures. First, I think a writer has to decide if he/she wants to break and/or punch the reader’s heart. If so, then the writer might also have to decide how to achieve that effect using the given structure. For example, if a writer chooses “an omniscience that explicitly or implicitly acknowledges the presence of a narrator who is writer qua writer,” how can that writer get to the reader’s heart (if again, that is the writer’s goal)?
From Craig Terlson
March 2, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Damn fine insights there — from both Almond and Brown. This is advice I will be carrying with me.
From Kyle Minor
March 2, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Well, it’s more difficult, isn’t it?, to do it that way, especially in the shortest forms. But poets do it. And, sure, novelists have done it plenty (Kundera, Roth, Styron, to give just three examples.)
From Randall Brown
March 2, 2010 at 4:28 pm
It is more difficult, and I’ve failed to do it. I’m wondering if you have any advice, Kyle, on how to make that work.
From Randall Brown
March 2, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Thanks, Craig.
From Kyle Minor
March 2, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Well, I guess with flash fiction, since it’s the lyrical that the form so privileges, it’s difficult to make blanket statements about how it’s done. You have to figure out the point of view first, and I don’t just mean technically — also on grounds of the places where feeling is stoked (want, need, desire, fear, longing, bullshit-detection, etc.) And from there you have to make choices that shape what follows based on the interaction between the technical choices and the characterological stuff. And that means you’re making it new every time, if you’re choosing a more difficult (not a close third or a first person) point of view. That’s the thrill of it, but it also makes it difficult to talk about in the abstract. Each piece requires a different strategy, I’d think.
The other issue, which I think you’ve touched on, here, is that a lot of flash fiction is interested in something other than heart-breaking. A lot of it flies on the pleasures of the cerebral or the ironic or the imagistic. In those cases, of course, we’d have a different conversation than the one we’re having here.
From Randall Brown
March 2, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Yes, Kyle, that is the thrill of it, fer sure.
From Bonnie ZoBell
March 2, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Thanks for sharing this, Randall.
I love “I want sudden bursts of empathy, unbearable feelings, excessive emotional involvement. I want my heart broken …” Excellent advice.
But then I think Steve Almond is one of the best critics out there, having had the fortune of being in his workshops several times. He’s the most generous reader–no, I don’t mean because he doesn’t give criticism, but because he gives such incisive criticism, really gets into the work and thinks.
I know what he says here to you about flash will help me.
Bonnie
From gay degani
March 2, 2010 at 6:41 pm
What this reminds me is what a delicate balance flash fiction is between the spare and the necessary. And how hard it is to achieve that balance. Great timing right here for me today as I go over several short pieces that don’t really work. I need to give them the “Almond test!”
From Ramon Collins
March 3, 2010 at 6:34 pm
I’ve learned there are two Flash camps: 1.] Flash is a story. 2.] Flash is NOT a story.
Although some writers feel the NOT camp gives more poetic license, it’s my experience readers prefer a story of some sort.
Why is it that on writers’ forums like this, readers are seldom mentioned?
From cynthia newberry martin
March 4, 2010 at 7:58 am
Thanks for sharing these comments. I’ve been struggling with the whole withholding issue lately–how to, when, how much. This helps.
From Hobie
March 6, 2010 at 1:03 am
I love this. Breaking through to the hot emotional core of a character’s struggle is where it’s at!
As for the 2 camps of flash, I have a third camp — Flash is not necessarily a story, but a compression of either Narrative, Image, Character, or Emotion — with overlap, of course. In the Field Guide (rose metal press), someone wrote that Flash needs to be a story — involving a character who yearns.
Simple dichotomies, which are so loved, fail again.
From Randall Brown
March 6, 2010 at 9:56 am
Agreed, Hobie, fer sure, about compression being at the core of flash.